Despite the mounds of evidence indicating that President John F. Kennedy was the victim of an elaborate conspiracy organized by elements of the national-security state, there are many who still believe the Lee Harvey Oswald “lone-nut” explanation proffered by the Warren Commission.

A partial explanation for this could be ignorance. Many are simply not aware of the difficulties in the Warren Commission Report. Sure, they may be generally aware of the controversy surrounding it, but they are unfamiliar with the particulars and have neither the time nor the inclination to look further into the matter. So they accept the regime’s explanation of the assassination, no matter how questionable it is, and move on.

But I believe there is another explanation: denial. Many Americans cling to an idealized view of their country. Although they are aware that coups and assassinations frequently occur abroad, they tell themselves that such things cannot happen at home. After all, America is an open society governed by the rule of law and watched over by a free press. Surely, if such sinister plots existed, they would be exposed and the wrongdoers punished accordingly. Right?

James Douglass deals with this objection in his magnificent book JFK and the Unspeakable. “The unspeakable” was a term coined by the Catholic spiritual writer Thomas Merton. The unspeakable is “an evil whose depth and deceit seemed to go beyond the capacity of words to describe.” The truth regarding the JFK assassination, according to Douglass, is “unspeakable” because its implications are too disturbing for many to accept. Douglass explains,

The extent to which our national security state was systematically marshaled for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains incomprehensible to us. When we live in a system, we absorb a system and think in a system. We lack the independence needed to judge the system around us. Yet the evidence we have seen points toward our national security state, the systemic bubble in which we all live, as the source of Kennedy’s murder and immediate cover-up.

On December 22, 1963, one month to the day after JFK’s death, The Washington Post published an op-ed by former president Harry S. Truman, in which he expressed dismay at what the CIA had become in the 16 years since its creation in 1947. Truman wrote that he was “disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment” to keep the President fully informed on intelligence matters and had been transformed into “an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.

Interestingly, Truman’s op-ed ran in the paper’s morning edition but was mysteriously pulled from the afternoon edition and was ignored by the national press.

Truman’s regrets regarding the creation of the CIA are important because it was during his presidency that the fledgling agency took form. It was during the Eisenhower years, however, that the CIA really came of age; running wild around the world, staging coups, fomenting civil wars, and assassinating foreign leaders, all the while developing a vast array of capabilities. By 1963, the CIA had become a rogue agency.

JFK was not totally without blame for this ominous development. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, he created the Special Group Augmented (SGA). This committee, which was led by his brother Robert and staffed by high-ranking members of the country’s national-security apparatus, was charged with marshaling the resources of multiple government agencies to carry out a regime-change operation in Cuba. To achieve this objective, SGA decided to coordinate the various anti-Castro activities then being conducted by the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department under one program. The program was code named Operation Mongoose.

Mongoose directed a broad range of activities against the Castro government. These included economic warfare, sabotage, and even assassination. General Edward Lansdale, the man selected to lead the program, brought in a group of CIA operatives who had extensive experience orchestrating coups and carrying out assassinations abroad. Mongoose also enlisted the aid of Mafia figures who were eager to reclaim their Cuban casino operations.

What Mongoose did was pool the resources and put in place the various planners, technicians, moles, mechanics, and patsies necessary to carry out the operation: the killing of Castro. For the conspirators in JFK’s assassination, it could have been a relatively simple matter of reverse engineering the program to target the U.S. president rather than Castro.

The motive for the conspirators might have been JFK’s “retreat” from Cuba and the various peace initiatives he undertook in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy had decided that reclaiming Cuba for the American empire was not worth chancing a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and that it was imperative that the Cold War be ended. Perhaps it was at this point that factions within the military/intelligence apparatus decided to kill him. Kennedy’s death would automatically lead to the ascension of Lyndon B. Johnson to the presidency, a man much more amenable to the interests of the military-industrial complex.

Admittedly, the above scenario is speculative. But, given the available evidence, it is certainly more plausible than the official “lone-nut” scenario put forth by the Warren Commission and still promoted by the mainstream media as history. Of course, it would clarify matters a great deal if the U.S. government declassified all records pertaining to the president’s assassination. But that is something they are not yet ready to do, although it has been a half century since the event. Why?

Taking a step back, we can see that JFK’s assassination appears to be a classic palace coup, although one that was broadcast to the entire nation and captured in living color for posterity.

JFK was no babe in the woods, but he had pretensions of leadership that may have ultimately put him at odds with the national-security state. This clash culminated in the bloody events in Dallas on November 22, 1963. The tragic irony, of course, is that JFK and his brother, Robert, participated in the construction of the very system that many believe murdered them both.

To consider a plausible, common sense, logical explanation for occurred in November 1963 in Dallas, please consider reading my new book, "The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK." It will be published this fall.

This article is where the uninformed need to start. It's precise and easy to understand. There is so much evidence, hard evidence, to the contrary of the Warren coverup, that, after even a casual foray into the pile, one can no longer be party to the "lone Nut/magic bullet" nonsense.

Mr. Kelly's column here is a terrific concise explanation of what took many hours of careful reading in several books to understand. I am currently reading Douglass's book mentioned in the article and it indeed is magnificent and packed with supporting detail. My one wish is that more information is made public to expose this travesty once and for all time. Perhaps in time we can turn over a new leaf as a country and root out the corruption and evil forces lurking within.

Seems old Allen Dulles was right when he stated to the Warren Commissioners that the American public would not read the Warren Report, so it did not matter if the contrived story of the assassination of President Kennedy, contained therein, was tenable or believable. The "official version" of the murder of President Kennedy has not an iota of factual evidence that can link alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, to the heinous crime. The timing of shots and execution of the murder at a specific place in Dealey Plaza actually refutes the lone assassin theory proffered by our government, via the Warren [C]omission. Invariably, the full resources of the CIA, Military, and Defense department (National Security Apparatus) went into the planning of the coup on November 22, 1963, as other foreign coups were not as sophisticated, nor did they need to be as Americans were NOT that concerned, and were already “conditioned” that coups happen all the time in foreign lands. Little did they know that this “conditioning” would also factor into the planned American coup. When Kennedy was murdered, the reaction of the masses was stunned disbelief, but subdued acceptance of the government’s white wash. Many would say the government, and Bobby Kennedy, Attorney General and brother of the slain President, had reasons for pre-empting a full investigation: National Security. If this one reason does not make one sit up and pay attention, then, again, Allen Dulles was most prescient in his pronouncement about the lack of historical interest in the report. I also think the Commissioners, themselves, did not believe the report would withstand historical scrutiny; and, therefore, the “protective mindset” of the National Security state to continuously “endorse” this sham report.

One last point: Kennedy’s American University speech regarding peace initiative, according to Special Assistant Ted Sorensen , was kept confidential in fear that the unprecedented tone would "set off alarm bells in more bellicose quarters in Washington" and allow political attacks against Kennedy in advance of the speech.[3] In the days before the speech, Kennedy was committed to addressing the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Honolulu and asked Sorensen to construct the initial draft with input from several members of Kennedy's staff. The speech was reviewed and edited by Kennedy and Sorensen on the return flight from Honolulu days before the address. Historian and Special Assistant Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. observed in his diary, "[F]rom the viewpoint of orderly administration, this was a bad way to prepare a major statement on foreign policy. But the State Department could never in a thousand years have produced this speech.” If the “best and the brightest” could not discern the footprint of the National Security state, surely, President Kennedy did; with characteristic determination, he pushed against the warmongering posture of his powerful opponents. This dangerous gambit cost him his life, and sent the American democracy down a perilous course and fomented the greatest divisions in this country since the Civil War.